A Snack of Opportunity

Update 2/25/2018

It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog post. A few important things have happened since then.

I resigned my job doing adult education. It was never a good fit, and while I am grateful that I could bring my baby with me to work one day a week, it was ultimately not fulfilling and wasn’t really a step forward on my career path. I’m so happy to have had the opportunity to meet the people I did, and to see how adult education functions, but all my professional development is focused pretty heavily on gifted education in PreK-12th graders.

I took a job as the gifted coordinator for a K-8 school. The school is an immersive language school; meaning that all instruction until grade 3 is done in the target language (Mandarin or Spanish), with 1 hour of English instruction starting in 3rd grade, and a 50/50 split by middle school. I’m 100% sold on this model: from what I’ve seen, the fluency that comes from early bilingual education is quite remarkable. Unfortunately, I came into the school after a period where no one was in the role of gifted teacher, so I’ve had to build the compliance, identification and programming largely from scratch. It’s been frustrating, but the school should be in a much better place starting next year (which is good, because the school identifies gifted kids at three times the rate of the rest of the school district).

I completed my PhD in Curriculum & Instruction. My dissertation was motivated by the inequity I’ve seen in gifted education and a desire to help identify gifted students in underserved populations. I focused on whether inventories to measure curiosity could be used to find underrepresented gifted kids. My data was pretty conclusive: curiosity looks to be a strong predictor for heightened intellectual advancement, so it could be used to find Black, Hispanic and Low-SES kids who might normally get passed over by traditional GT identification measures.

I’m working on my principal’s license and hopefully a district administration license beyond that. I’m getting all the school out of the way and becoming the single most qualified person I can be for education jobs. By 2019, I will have both those licenses, as well as a Ed.S (second Masters).

My eldest kid is still at the super-expensive exploratory school. She’s doing great there, but I’m already seeing storms on the horizon due to her asynchrony. The other kiddo is at a daycare facility 3 days a week, and while his sister has a angry/destructive streak, his “dark side” is depressive like mine. They are both wonderful kids that I am intensely proud of, and it’s great to see them form friendships with “grownups.”